6 Tips to Consider Before Re-designing Your Website

When considering a website redesign or making development changes, always keep user experience in mind.
Maintaining the strength of certain website variables, one can make significant changes. There are many reasons for a redesign. Some reasons include: an outdated look and feel,  inability to manage content effectively, or keeping up with competitors' websites.

Here are 6 tips for things you must consider before a web redesign:

1. Assess your current situation
Review your analytics programs to see what parts of the site are performing. This provides initial basis
for improvement. Things to analyze are: search engine traffic volume, conversion points, calls to
action, etc.

2. Research your competitor's websites
If your competitors have just invested in a redesign, then it may well be time for you to have one.
Consider, users can use your competitor's site which has improved navigation, clearer, more up to
date and relevant content featuring all the services and products that your company has, but are not
featured on your outmoded site, and a nicer look and feel about it.

3. Utilize a Content Management System (CMS)
Many website owners now prefer to use a CMS, such as WordPress, so that the site can easily be
updated without requiring technical skills. Depending on the amount and type of updates that are
anticipated, a CMS is a smart, time efficient tool.

4. Have a plan for 301 redirects
Ensure the site features a 301(permanent redirect) for visitors and search engines if you are changing
the URL for your site. It may be necessary to change the URL either for SEO purposes, or because of
technical changes, such as a CMS. Some redesigns feature a link from the old site to the new one.

5. Make adjustments to the navigation focus on intuitive structure
and/or pages have been added to the site since the last design, it is possible that navigation is no
longer optimal. Before designing think about how visitors will want to move through the site, and make
it as easy as possible for them.

6. Incorporate user interaction as much as possible
The most successful websites are able to get visitors involved. Blogs are great for this purpose because
they allow for comments and discussion. Other possibilities are forums, games, user generated
content, polls, quizzes, etc. By making the website more engaging to visitors you are more likely to get
a high number of repeat visitors and increase conversions.

Additional items to remember
implement Google Webmaster Tools, which will provide helpful information about your website, specifically
broken links, backlinks and sitemaps. Thirdly, ensure there are no old URLs being linked to on the site. Lastly,
remember to update website sitemaps, Google sitemaps, and any feeds that are running.